respectfully if your wife asks if youre in the army and you say no cuz you were in the USAF... thats a lie. Even if she didnt ask the most precise manner of the question... you were in a form of the armed Forces. i dont know you dude but...really?

_________________________
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

respectfully if your wife asks if youre in the army and you say no cuz you were in the USAF... thats a lie. Even if she didnt ask the most precise manner of the question... you were in a form of the armed Forces. i dont know you dude but...really?

Jeff and you may differ on the semantics of what a lie is but that's beside the point. The bottom line as I read it is that he felt awful about the omission and apologized to her, then came here and bared his imperfections to us. I do know Jeff since coming here to MS and consider him a close friend - in no small part because of his remarkable candor and sensitivity.

As one Politian said to a congressman when asked a question during a congressional hearing: Politian, "I can't recall." Congressman, "so are you saying you did or did not say it" Politian, "I am saying I don't recall!"

When I first started seeing a therapist, she would ask me why I was unwilling to acknowledge being abused had any negative impacts on my life. I told her that feelings get in the way of business (at the time a good excuse in my eyes), and besides that would require me to acknowledge something awful happened and that it was my fault(so naive), and I wasn't about to do that. Years later, I came to understand that you never fault kids, when they are following an adultís directions and started to slowly acknowledge those negative effects.

Honesty, to a fault, is a trait in me, anyway. I'm too honest. I have a compulsion to tell others I was abused- I'm talking about random strangers. I grew up with a compulsion to always confess to my mom every wrong thing I did. It makes me very vulnerable, because "normal people" know how to exercise discretion to protect when and where and to whom they confess their most closely guarded secrets. I'm trying to learn that. I just feel so guilty if I keep anything secret. Like my diaper fetish. I'm horribly ashamed and guilty about it, and I always regret telling people about it, because of the stigma around it. People always end up exploiting my compulsive honesty. Like others have said on here, though, I paradoxically have trouble being honest with myself sometimes.

No. I knew about It long enough and hid the truth from young enough that it sort of never sunk into me that hiding the truth is actually bad. And that's not even with taking into account the denial and self-deception and externalized feigned homophobia meant to cover my real orientation / desires.

My family is full of creepy secrets and I reached adulthood with one sequential disclosure after another beginning around age 15 and then rolling out one by one til well into my 30s. Secret cousin marriages, secret adoptions, secret divorces, secret Vietnam draft-dodging, secret poly "marriages", secret lifetimes on antidepressants, secret crazy relatives in a secret institution, my mother's secret twin who died at 6, secret 20-year absence for grandpa having something to do with guns in South America, and the mother(fucker) of them all, my sister secretly being the "keeping up appearances" girlfriend of one of the most notorious serial pederasts of the 1980s. Yes you have to keep track of who knows what. No none of them are ever discussed with more than 2 or 3 people at a time. So amidst all that what's a little secret bathroom sodomy? 6 months after telling my wife, parents, in-laws, and dozens of my friends, we are ALL STILL KEEPING THAT A SECRET from my sister due to her remaining loyalty to her own favorite rapist.

After my memories became real, I went through all of last November and December doing nothing at my job whatsoever. I'd read MS on my phone and find unused offices to go cry. This did not go unnoticed so I got the most dire warnings possible. I held them off with an unprecedented campaign of remorseless professional fraud, forgery, and plagiarism. I'd fake work product and add fake testimonials from fake people on how good it was and how much I improved. I deliberately added some fake mistakes in the midst of my fake successes so I could still be seen as screwing up and be yelled at in a "controlled" manner. If everyone thinks you're a bad liar no one dreams you could be a good - a GREAT one. My only honest energies went towards getting another job. I parachuted away before the timebomb of bullshit could go off.

I paid a dark price for all of my secrets but on that occasion they paid me back.

I'm generally up front with folks. I'd never dliberately lie, cheat, or steal. I once bought a bunch of outdoor plants at a nursery and got home to find they didn't charge me for several of them---about $20 worth. I went back there the next day and paid for them.

BUT,

I held a secret for years and lied at times to keep it hidden. At times I've withheld the truth to maximize my security vis-a-vis the CSA episode. Humans are apt to do such things since self-preservation presents with primal urgency.Will

Edited by Suwanee (05/17/1302:10 PM)

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I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. ---FDR

i am sorry to come in so late on this thread. many posts have been edited out, so i missed a lot.

i came here to be honest. as best as i can.

honestyis the key to open the door between you and me

but i also believe what zappa says.

"information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty."

the closer the truth, the sharper the sword, the deeper the cut.

i would say, i am too honest. to be honest, i have often disclosed inappropriately (wrong reason/person/time/place). i have done it even when i knew i should shut up before i even speak up.

for that, i am truly sorry. my story can hurt people, and i know that. yet it hurts to keep it secret. so i find a way to slide it into the conversation, naturally, and find myself telling the story. the results are not usually good. i figure if they can't hack it, who needs them. pretty harsh.

i lied all through my childhood. all the way through my teens. right up until my first disclosure in my early twenties. i swore i would never live a lie again. the lie lived on for many years.

my drowning/baptism/born-again/near-death experience in my late twenties fixed me up for good. "telling the truth" became as easy as breathing. the penalties for being blunt i considered the price of admission to the land of freedom.the cost was no sacrifice, but a smart investment. i believed the solitude and social stigma of brutal truth to be proper penance for years of misleading myself and others. i had done enough damage with distraction, deception, denial, and distortion. surely, the noble truth can do no harm.

it took me several more years to realize that "being honest" and "telling the truth" are not the same thing.

the truth is more than the facts. the truth is a powerful tool. the truth is an invisible shield. the truth is a lethal weapon. handle with care.

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